The Bad Karma Diaries

T he bad K ar ma D ia r i e s Bridget Hourican

First published 2011 by The O’Brien Press Ltd, 12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, Dublin 6, Ireland.

Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777 E-mail: books@obrien.ie Website: www.obrien.ie

ISBN:978-1-84717-085-9 Copyright for text © Bridget Hourican 2011 Copyright for typesetting, layout, editing, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

The O’Brien Press receives assistance from

Front cover image: iStockphoto Editing, typesetting, layout and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd. Printed by CPI Cox and Wyman Ltd The paper used in this book is produced using pulp from managed forests.

To Leanora

New Year’s Day Yesterday we dismantled our blog – or at least we cut it loose and sent it adrift into cyberspace, because apparently old blogs never die or disappear, they just circulate the web forever with nobody reading them (… that’s making me think about infinity, which is making my head ACHE). Our blog was … what was it? The public face of this diary? The diary’s bad sister? Anyway, they were linked; I started them at (nearly) the same time and they were both really demanding. You can’t write ‘Did nothing today’ in your diary ’cause it would make you feel like a boring person, and you DEFINITELY can’t post that on your blog because your readers would be really unimpressed … but keeping myself not-bored and my readers impressed is what made this term incredibly exciting, but also exhausting. If I hadn’t had to keep feeding the diary and the blog, well, half the things that happened this term mightn’t have happened … I’m GLAD they happened, but now I want to step back a bit and let Karma settle!

O’Toole (our English teacher) says you have to know when to end – whatever it is you’re writing, you should know when its moment is up. So sorry, diary, but your moment is up! It’s the first of January and a new term will be starting soon, so now is the time to cut you loose … yes, I KNOW you want to know what happened last night at Keith’s party, but if I start writing entries again, well, soon I’ll be caught in more adventures and there’ll be no cut-off point. For 7

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instance, last term I couldn’t have stopped writing just when we set up the Instruments of Karma (to do nasty things to people who deserve it), or when I was fighting with Anna, or when I found out about Justine … because I was in the MIDDLE of all those things and I needed to see them through. You can’t just stop writing about things when they’re still going on. So since now we’re on a break and nothing much is going on (except at Keith’s party, when we … ha!

No way!) …

It’s goodbye (for now), diary, and you won’t drift in cyberspace forever; you’ll sit at the back of the drawer, and if you don’t get thrown out, or lost, or burnt – yes, there’s that risk, you’re only paper!

– then some day some lucky person will get to read all about Bomb and Demise and what happened when they set out on their marvellous adventures at the beginning of Second Year …

Denise Nelson (and Anna Power) The Bad Karma Diaries 7 September-31 December R.I.P.

F A J

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Monday September 7th Today is the first day of school, so here are my New Term Resolutions. Me and Anna (my best friend) don’t do New Year Resolutions because what’s called the New Year – 1 January – doesn’t feel like the new year, it feels like the middle of the year. The new year is when you go back to school and you’ve moved up a year. So here are my New Term Resolutions: L Study harder L Eat healthy food L Take up a sport L Keep this diary L Do some exciting stuff to put on our blog (mine and Anna’s) – Urgent!!!

L Check out the new people in the class I will explain about the blog tomorrow. I already started on the last resolution. The only interesting thing about the first day of term is the new people in your class. Because you never know – they might be the best fun, or they might be mad and crazy, or they just might fall in love with you. So anyway, we have a new boy and a new girl. The girl is called Heeun. She is from Korea and she looks stylish, or posh, or snobbish – not sure which!

Well, she looks like when she’s out of her uniform, she’ll wear

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very expensive clothes with designer labels. She is quite pretty. I think some of the boys are going to fancy her.

The new boy is called David Leydon. He has long hair and is very scruffy. Even though he is in a uniform same as everyone else he looks much scruffier. I don’t think he talked to anyone all day. He looked fed-up and rebellious, but he’s not exactly goodlooking – he has spots – so it’s hard to know if the girls are going to fancy him.

Tuesday September 8th Went to Anna’s house after school. In her kitchen when we came in were her mum and Charlie (her baby brother) and then Tommy (her older brother) came in, and then Renata (her older sister) came in with Alva (a friend of Renata’s). You can never predict who’s going to be in Anna’s, that’s why it’s exciting.

Once I said this to Anna and she said kind of sarcastically, ‘Yeah, I know, what numbers are coming up today? It’s like the Lotto.’

So now every time we reach her front door, I say, ‘What are the Lotto numbers today?’

Her mum asked how was the diary coming on because the diary was her idea. She is a sighchiatrist (yes, I know this is not the right spelling, but it is Renata’s joke; she says her mum’s patients are always sighing about their problems). Anyway, being a psychiatrist (there!) makes Anna’s mum very interested 10

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in everything we’re doing, I think.

When we were sitting round last week talking about what we were gonna put on our blog, she said, ‘But if it’s online, everyone can read it?’ and we said, ‘Well of course,’ and then she said,‘But you need somewhere to confide your private thoughts.’

She said a diary was important for processing whatever was on our minds. As soon as she said ‘processing’, Renata snorted and shot up from her book, ‘Processing? You want to turn their thoughts into Easi Singles?’

Her mum said, ‘Oh, Renata!’

Anna and I exchanged a look. In Anna’s kitchen Renata is always reading a book and making like she’s not listening but then she’ll suddenly shoot into the conversation with some remark that you can’t (well I can’t) understand. And her mum always says, ‘Oh, Renata!’ in a warning voice, but also in a kind of delighted voice. You can tell she thinks the remark is brilliant, really. Me and Anna call it Renata’s Snort, Swivel, Swat routine.

It goes like this 1. Snort 2. Look up from book 3. Swivel eyes in our direction 4. Nasty/incomprehensible remark (that’s the Swat – she swats us like flies) 5. ‘Oh, Renata!’

6. Back down to book 11

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They didn’t ask me to stay for dinner so I had to come home.

Fishfingers and chips and peas. Boring! Unhealthy! At Anna’s they were having Rat-a-too-ee. At least that is what it sounds like. Exciting! Probably healthy! It is going to be easier for Anna to keep her New Term Resolution to eat healthy food than it is for me. I told my mum about my resolution and that she needed to help by not serving fishfingers and chips (peas are okay).

She said, ‘Well, make your own then!’ in a snappy way.

I noticed that Justine (my younger sister) was not really eating her chips either. Maybe we will go on strike together against Mum’s unhealthy cooking!

Wednesday September 9th Just got text from Anna: demise, don’t forget rules for oaths That was easy, so I texted right back: Thanks, bomb, in the bag, how’s trials?

Response: Inside on vast, feel eat and pick, on brain, can’t study…

Whaaaatttt …? Couldn’t work that one out. Had to unscramble. Then I texted back: Greedy any!

This is in our top secret texting language! What we actually wrote is: 12

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Denise, don’t forget ruler for maths Thanks, Anna, in the bag, how’s tricks?

Gorged on tart, feel fat and sick, no brain, can’t study…

Greedy cow!

OK, so our top-secret texting language is not so hard to work out … Clue: our names, Denise and Anna, come out as ‘Demise’ and ‘Bomb’. In fact our names coming out like that is what got us started because they don’t just sound funny, they belong together, because bombs cause demises.

Anna always says,‘When I explode, you die, so I’m the boss of you!’

The rule is you have to use the first word that predictive texting throws up. This means we’re always looking for odd words, because normal words like ‘thanks’ and ‘can’t’ and ‘feel’ just come up as themselves. Of course Anna wouldn’t normally write ‘gorged on tart’, she’d write ‘ate too much cake’, but that wouldn’t come out too interesting. You have to find another way to say it.

Well, now I’m gonna go and do my oaths homework! Ha ha ha!

Thursday September 10th Caroline Hunter has a baby picture of herself up on Facebook that looks like she slept in curlers and is entering a baby beauty 13